ergo/docs/INFO.md

Oragono Information

Here’s a bunch of misc info about the Oragono server! This can include questions, plans on how I’m going forward, how to properly use features, or why Oragono does/doesn’t do something.

Essentially, this document acts as a braindump about Oragono while we figure out a better place to put all this information.

Accounts and Channels

Most IRC servers out there offer IRC account and channel registration through external services such as NickServ and ChanServ. In Oragono, we bundle accounts and channel ownership in as a native server feature instead!

Because there’s a lot of aspects of accounts/channels that haven’t been specified as native commands and all yet, Oragono includes the pseudo-clients NickServ and ChanServ to roughly mimic the functionality that other IRCds get from services packages, in a user-facing set of commands that’s familiar to everyone.

The plan is to move more features and functionality (such as channel registration, channel permissions and all) over to native commands first and to use the NickServ/ChanServ as legacy interfaces to access these functions. However, it’s gonna be a while before all of this is specified by someone like the IRCv3 WG.

PROXY

The PROXY command, specified by HAProxy’s PROXY v1 specifications, allows someone to setup HAProxy in front of Oragono. This allows them to use HAProxy for TLS negotiation (allowing older versions of SSL/TLS than Go’s inbuilt TLS support does). However, it also allows them to update TLS certificates by updating them with HAProxy, rather than relying on our REHASH command (which is less-well-tested than I’d like right now).

This is a toss-up of course – allowing older versions of TLS might be seen as undesired, and I wouldn’t use the feature myself, but it’s useful for real-world installations which is why it exists. The command is only allowed from specific hosts which should restrict it appropriately.

Server-to-Server Linking (or Federation)

Right now Oragono doesn’t support linking multiple servers together. It’s certainly planned, but it’s a fair while away.

When I do add S2S linking to Oragono, I want to use it as a testbed for a new sort of linking protocol. Mostly, I want a meshy protocol that minimises the effects of netsplits while still ensuring that messages get delivered, and preserves the AP nature of IRC reliability (in terms of the CAP theorem), which is something that traditional solutions based on the Raft protocol don’t do.

Basically, I’m going to continue working on my DCMI protocol, get that to a point where I’m happy with it and then start looking at S2S linking properly. If anyone is interested in server protocols and wants to look at this with me, please feel free to reach out!

Rehashing

Rehashing is reloading the config files and TLS certificates. Of course, you can rehash the server by connect, opering-up and using the /REHASH command. However, similar to other IRCds, you can also make the server rehash by sending an appropriate signal to it!

To make the server rehash from the command line, send it a SIGHUP signal. In *nix and OSX, you can do this by performing the following command:

killall -HUP oragono

This will make the server rehash its configuration files and TLS certificates, and so can be useful if you’re automatically updating your TLS certs!

REST API

Oragono contains a draft, very early REST API implementation. My plans for this is to allow external web interfaces or other automated programs to monitor what’s going on with the server, apply/remove bans, and to essentially allow administration of the server without being connected to it and opered-up. This sort of API mimics InspIRCd and Anope, which contain similar APIs.

I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to continue to be developed, and I’m sure there’ll be lots of changes around appropriately restricting access to the API, which is why it’s disabled for now and not exposed in our Docker builds. As well, while it’s very unstable, the REST API doesn’t count for our SemVer versioning. When this feature is more developed and I’m happy with where it’s at, I’ll provide proper support and documentation for the API.

Rejected Features

‘Rejected’ sounds harsh, but basically these are features I’ve decided I’m not gonna implement in Oragono (at least, not until someone convinces me they’re worth doing).

Force/Auto-Join Channels on Connect

When a user connects, some IRC servers let you force-join them to a given channel. For instance, this could be a channel like #coolnet for a network named CoolNet, a lobby channel, or something similar.

My main objection to having this feature is just that I don’t like it that much. It doesn’t seem nice to forcibly join clients to a channel, and I know I’m always annoyed when networks do it to me.

To network operators that want to do this, I’d suggest instead mentioning the channel(s) in your MOTD so that your users know the channels exist! If they want to join in, they can do it from there :)